New features promised for smartphones, tablets and watches could improve how we interact with technology. Although it's too soon to tell how well these will work in practice, here's a look at what I'm looking forward to most ...

Google is making its privacy controls easier to find and understand in an attempt to make the more than 1 billion users of its digital services more comfortable about the personal information that they give the Internet's ...

A team of researchers at the National University of Singapore has published a paper on their university web site outlining what they describe as geo-inference attacks—where hackers can set up a website and then use cache ...

The federal agency that oversees railroads has asked digital mapping companies to alert drivers as they approach track crossings in the hope that visual and audio cues will lead to greater awareness of potential dangers.

Google Maps

Google Maps (for a time named Google Local) is a web mapping service application and technology provided by Google, free (for non-commercial use), that powers many map-based services, including the Google Maps website, Google Ride Finder, Google Transit, and maps embedded on third-party websites via the Google Maps API. It offers street maps, a route planner for traveling by foot, car, or public transport and an urban business locator for numerous countries around the world. According to one of its creators (Lars Rasmussen), Google Maps is "a way of organising the world's information geographically".

Google Maps uses the Mercator projection, so it cannot show areas around the poles. A related product is Google Earth, a stand-alone program for Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, SymbianOS, and iPhone OS which offers more globe-viewing features, including showing polar areas.